Doug Engelbart: Much More Than the Mouse

Douglas C. Engelbart, who stared at radar screens during World War II, helped transform computers into an interactive visual medium. That was just one of his big ideas.

Widely described as the father of the computer mouse, Engelbart played a key role in inventing or refining other building blocks for PCs and the Web–including bitmapped computer displays, word processing and the concept of navigating online by pointers known as links.

Engelbart, who died July 2 at the age of 88, demonstrated many of the ideas at a jaw-dropping event in 1968 in San Francisco still widely called the “mother of all demos.” His research center at Silicon Valley’s Stanford Research Institute was the second node on what evolved into the Internet.

But Engelbart never achieved the wealth or fame of entrepreneurs at companies like Apple and Microsoft that would build on some of his ideas. Friends say he at times lamented that his broader goal–to fundamentally expand human capabilities with computers–wasn’t understood or appreciated.

“Doug was the Moses of the information age,” says Paul Saffo, a futurist and managing director of the research firm Discern Analytics, who has known Engelbart since the early 1980s. “He did quite a lot to lead us all to the digital promised land, but was left behind on the wrong side of the Red Sea.”

Engelbart was the son of a Portland, Ore., radio shop owner who died when his son was nine years old. He studied electronic engineering in college and was a Navy radar technician during World War II. After the war, Engelbart worked as a wind-tunnel engineer at the Ames Research Center in Sunnyvale, Calif., now a part of NASA.

It was while at Ames that Engelbart had what he later described as a vision of the information age, conceiving a world where people could interact with computers through cathode ray tubes like the ones in televisions, and use them to share information and solve problems collectively. His ideas germinated in an age when computers were room-sized devices that produced answers every so often from questions posed by computer tape or punch cards, not the interactive tools people know today.

Engelbart “was moving toward the computer as a communications device, something for navigating knowledge,” says Mark Weber, founder and curator of the Internet history program at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. “That was a really, really radical idea in the ‘50s and the ‘60s.”

Like others of his era, Engelbart was inspired by a 1945 Atlantic Monthly article by the influential government science advisor Vannevar Bush, which posited a hypothetical device called the Memex that would help people efficiently store and retrieve books, records and communications. That idea planted seeds for the linking concept known as hypertext that became a foundation for the Web, later advanced independently by Engelbart and another researcher, Ted Nelson.

After receiving a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from University of California, Berkeley, Engelbart joined SRI, a government-sponsored lab that wound up cutting its ties to Stanford University. He led what he called the Augmentation Research Center there from 1959 to 1977.

Engelbart has said he got the idea for the mouse in 1961. It used two wheels–one turning vertically, the other horizontally–to help locate a cursor on a computer screen. The first prototype was built by his lead engineer, Bill English.

During the 1968 demonstration, he showed off other concepts like editing text on a computer display, use of multiple computer windows and video conferencing. He called his suite of innovations the “online system,” or NLS.

Engelbart resisted being identified with the mouse or other specific inventions, preferring to see his broader role in a collaborative vision he called Collective IQ. “The mouse was just a tiny piece of a much larger project, aimed at augmenting human intellect,” Engelbart told Superkids Educational Software Review in 2003.

But Engelbart lost federal funding and SRI wound up selling his center. Some of his team went to Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, which worked on office automation including personal computers and laser printers.

Engelbart later worked at Tymshare and then at McDonnell Douglas, before founding the Bootstrap Institute–where he offered management seminars on his ideas–and the Doug Engelbart Institute, which states its mission as advancing “his lifelong career goal of boosting our ability to better address complex, urgent problems.”

He was awarded the National Medal of Technology in 2000 as well as the Association for Computing Machinery’s A.M. Turing Award in 1997.

Saffo says that many of Engelbart’s ideas remain to be explored, or perfected–like multiple people trying to edit one document at once. “How many times have you worked simultaneously on a shared screen on a share document?” he asks. “It’s just too hard to do.”